


this is not a fairytale (you are not a hero)

by rory_the_dragon



Series: This Is Not A Fairytale [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, M/M, Minor Ableist Language, POV Second Person, dark!fic, unhealthy relationship dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:12:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rory_the_dragon/pseuds/rory_the_dragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a hunt, and he’s just figuring out he’s the prey; this is a game and you’ve blindfolded him so thoroughly, spun him around and ripped it away that he blinks unseeingly into the new situation, new game board; this is chess and he thinks he’s a white knight, a hero like his blood, when all the while he’s the queen you're going to check.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is not a fairytale (you are not a hero)

**Author's Note:**

> Because no one seems to be making Peter scary enough. Warnings for violence, frequent mentions of violence kink, ableist language, seduction of a minor and possible underage sex because it's not made clear how old Henry is in this.

 

1\. It’s a warning, really, friendly advice from you to him, sportsmanship, first and only, a signpost that you are not to be trusted. You are deception and it's best he finds that out now. You draw a line in the sand when you say his name _henry_ , then place yourself on opposite sides, no man's land an inch of space between you, let him know you’re not a friend so he thinks he knows where he stands with you, even as you circle around behind him. Waiting. This is a hunt, and he’s just figuring out he’s the prey; this is a game and you’ve blindfolded him so thoroughly, spun him around and ripped it away that he blinks unseeingly into the new situation, new game board; this is chess and he thinks he’s a white knight, a hero like his blood, when all the while he’s the queen you're going to check.

Lets play.

 

 

2\. This isn’t a fairytale, but you’ve been moulding yourself into one for centuries now. The Pied Piper mask running through cobbled streets with a tune and a promise, an outstretched hand with a claw-tight grip. You are the silhouette crouched on the windowsill that parents fear, you are the reason for barred windows with steel locks, a thief of children and you take, take, take until you are legend, until even kings tremble before you when you can take heirs and princes from their beds. Then you create more. Legend stacked upon myth stacked upon bedtime story all stacked upon you until you are every faceless figure that turns up in the night to steal that which is most precious, until every shadow holds you. You are the villain of your own piece, but your blood’s never thrummed like it does around that campfire, bare feet stamping war-cries into solid earth, skinny dirty arms thrown to the heavens with bird bone wrists, the snapcracklepop of firewood echoing inside your chest where your heart beats and beats and beats.

They are yours now. You found them when they were lost, and you have forged them yourself.

This is your legend and you are king.

 

 

3\. Pretend, pretend, pretend. Play pretend and then play it some more.

(That is one thing Wendy Darling taught you that you cannot hatelove _hate_ her for).

Pretend to be a pirate and dismantle Jones’ crew from the inside. Pretend to be a boy and dismantle Jones from the inside. Turn him into Hook and create a new story, a new legend. Then pretend to be a general and lead your boys into war. Crow when their clubs turn to steel under your eye, when bruises becomes wounds. You would try not to enjoy it as much as you do but why the hell shouldn’t you? If you were ever human it was too long ago to remember, and the only time you rejoice in humanity is when it’s lying at your feet.

 

 

4\. He meets your gaze, every time, unflinching, and hatred burns in his eyes like he’s flaying you. You’ve been carrying a sketch of him against your chest for over a century now and it thrills you that the real life believer is even better than anything you could have imagined him to be, because after a while ideas grow insipid and tiresome, taken out and looked at again and again until sun bleaches their colour and time wrinkles their edges, but he looks at you like he wants to run you through and you want to hand him a knife just to see what he’d do with it. You wonder what it’d feel like to have him push a blade through your belly - or would he go for the chest? Through the ribcage and plunged sure into the heart? – and twist it deep inside you. What would his precious face look like as he guts you? Would he grin with wolf’s teeth, shake and shudder with remorse? Or would he be blank, cold and hard, something more to break until it shatters and then roll around in the shards.

That thought almost makes you go through with it.

 

 

5\. You hand him a crossbow instead and when he fires it at your heart, you fall in love.

 

 

6\. He _hates_ you and you love it, unable to hide your delight as you push push push and he pushes right back. Your boys are your boys but therein lies the problem because they are yours while he is all his own and that has never happened to you before. Even Wendy had submitted, in her own way, in the end, walked into her cage to save her brothers instead of taking Hook’s hand and getting out. You hold the Lost Boys in line with love and the Darlings in line with fear and ghosts of threats. You’ve never experienced anything other than submission and he so stalwartly _refuses_ that it’s as if no one taught him what fear was in the first place. He despises you, viscerally, and you love it, punch drunk on it, flying high. You play him your song and he can’t hear it, offer him Neverland’s magic and he takes to it like a killer to a knife, turns around and starts breaking your things. You do not inhale because if you do your breath will hop, skip, jump out of your lungs and you need absolute stillness as you slink up behind him, place one hand on his wrist the other on his waist and teach him a kill blow.

You are teaching him how to kill you and it’s the most amazing thing in the world.

 

 

7\. You are a self-made legend, a self-made weapon, and you are rigged to go _ticktickboom_ at any given second. You have never been anything but scary but when the mermaids fall out of line and come after your own you feel the anger rise like a wave, scream out a thunderstorm and stamp an earthquake as you march, because you are Neverland as Neverland is you and she might be dying but you’ll be damned if some two-bit jumped-up fish will take what belongs to you. You take them out in eight minutes flat, so long only because your boys have charged and rallied with you, around you, and you do your best not to drown them. When you return, triumphant and high on glory, he is waiting for you. You are vibrating, drenched to the skin and covered in blood that is not your own, and his eyes slide over you like he wants to strangle you, but also wants to fuck you into the ground, the hard roots of trees, the goddamn ocean itself, while he does it.

You grin and his eyes shutter, but a victory is a victory is a victory and today you are truly victorious.

 

 

8\. Withdraw. This is a marathon and a sprint but above all it is a waiting game and you’ve always loved games. You’ve set up your pieces, planned your strategies, chosen your cards and set up your die. You’ve found new ways to define winning in these past few months, found it in fists to your ribcage in sparring sessions, arrows to your heart, a stolen scarf wrapped around your neck, your wrists, imagining his wrists, his neck. Now you find it in the prickling of his gaze against the back of your head, sought out, no longer the seeker, in sparring matches that push and pull muscles in a whole host of new ways, in noises pulled through bitten lips in his sleep as you listen, perched above and waiting. This is not the heart of the true believer but it is close, so withdraw. Keep your hands to yourself.

Make him bereft.

Make him come to you.

 

 

9\. Years ago you trapped Wendy Darling inside a cage, then again inside her porcelain doll body as her mind ages beyond her, older and wiser and growing madder as the years pass her by, alone, and you don’t even realise you’ve done it until fifty years have passed and she is still as young as the day she strode into her cell, head high.

Neverland looks after it’s own, it seems, and Wendy Darling has always been lost.

You cannot kill her; even on the days when you actually want to because you are Neverland is you and Wendy knows it in a high laugh and a crazy as a box of cats smile. So you threaten her brothers, baby John and Michael grown up without her, because you might lovehatelove Wendy Darling but you’ve never been able to love something softly, never been able to let anything go once it was in your grasp.

You let her out, the mother of Neverland to your father, and it’s another warning for him. You love with your teeth.

 

 

10\. For all your faults – and they are infinite, tattooed into your spine, in the scars of your lost boys, in the clean tear when you ripped your shadow away – you can be patient. You’ve waited thousands of years for him, after all, with nothing but a tattered sketch and a certainty in your chest, and maybe you’ve gone mad (madder?) in the wait but the thing is you’ve waited through every minute and you can wait more. You can wait him out.

 

 

11\. You underestimate how stubborn he is – always always underestimating him – and the realisation is a scream of frustration, a screech of joy.

 

 

12\. You have never been prey, never will be prey, but he hunts you through the forest and you let him, cheeks hurting from a grin of delight, of finally, even when – especially when – you feel the cool sting of his knife at your throat, his hiss of breath against your collarbone, and you break a rule that should have been broken long ago, you reach out and you touch, curl fingers around the cord-whip muscle of his forearm, linger, then wrench his forearm away.

 _now, now, henry,_ you tut, goading now because he’s here and you can _if you’d wanted me alone all you had to do was ask_ and he snarls his _shut up_ into your mouth until you can taste it, metallic on your tongue or is it his and he’s still a couple inches smaller than you but you don’t duck your head until he bites, draws blood, and you laugh, cruel, ecstatic, into his teeth, his hatred mutated. You let him push you to the ground, take his violence and throw it back to him, looping and cycling until you’re a storm, a hurricane of movement and flesh, and you’re on your back with the angriest boy in all the world scoring symphonies with his nails into the canvas of your abdomen, bruising the jut of your hips, until he has a hand around your cock, until you groan, a laugh tripping out beneath him. He thinks he’s winning until that laugh.

He hates you, but you think he might love you more than he hates you, and you’re not sure who he blames for that more.

He is still holding the knife.

 

 

13\. He doesn’t run, after. Instead he fucks you, wild against the base of a large oak just like his eyes promised you, you promised yourself, and there’s a thousand year old root digging into your back, and neither of you are ever going to concede to the other’s rhythms so it is staccato, and off-beat, and fantastic. You shred scars into his back, then push him onto them, into the dirt, ride him like you’re dying, because you are, you always are, make his lips pull back and bare his teeth.

Henry is the gentlest soul you’ve ever met but in the face of you he is _savage_.

 

 

14\. Time works differently in Neverland. It’s not that it doesn’t work; seasons change, fruit buds, swells, rots, the lost boys age (albeit slowly) even if you don’t, but it’s more an abstract concept, a funny little idea forgotten in the back of a mind. Neverland doesn’t take well to rules, and time is a rule first and foremost. But you are Neverland and if there is one thing you excel at it’s taking good little boys from their beds and twisting them into something new. So now time dances in Neverland. Months pass in days while weeks span years, and even you lose track of its steps until you’re inside him, buried to the hilt and pressing bark into his chest, his cheek, when his mother comes through the undergrowth. Neverland is yours so even with a saviour’s magic she cannot see you, but you can see her. There’re crows feet in the corners of her eyes, and you realise just how long you’ve had Henry.

And now Henry realises, too.

It was supposed to be quick and dirty, you’ve barely gotten your shirts off, his rucked up under his armpits, your pants clinging to the backs of your thighs by sheer willpower as you slammed him into the tree, pressed your mouth to the top nodules of his spine, bitten. Now Henry shakes beneath you, and there isn’t anything soft left in you but your bite becomes a caress, a susurrus of flesh back and forth against his skin as he trembles, as Emma Swan walks on, away, as you think _mine_ , cant your hips up, bite down, salve the wound with your tongue and when he comes, he cries.

 

 

15\. After that you expect him to pull away, break, shatter your grip on him, and you wouldn’t say you brace for it because even if he is a wave of anger you are the ocean, but fight thrums through your veins because when has it ever not? You are done with waiting and while you can be patient, you are hungry first last and always, greedy, and you do not take well to losing your things, ask Wendy in her cage, ask the boy who was Felix before Felix, whose voice deepened beyond saving and who you led deep into the heart of neverland’s forest to take care of.

(Always expecting, always surprised.)

Grief manifests through him in bitemarks bruising, bleeding, across your skin, nail dragged so deep to the bone of your shoulders that even you have to open your mouth O, choke on it, shudder. He has always loved deeply, felt things deeply, and with you he loves _viciously_ , feels viciously, takes his hurt and turns it into a knife, takes the knife and plunges it into his heart, your heart, because he hates you like he loves you and you are all he has left now.

 

 

16\. Neverland has made him angry, wild, a lost boy in his bones and his belly and his breath, but his heart, his perfect golden littleboy heart that beats out belief like this is a fairytale, that believes to the edge of ridiculousness and beyond… his heart is unchanged, untainted, even with the lovehatelove he cradles in his chest for you, pure like absolution you don’t want, won’t take, and he won’t offer. You feel its beat with your hands, pressed hard against his chest when you’re beneath him, shaped into claws like you can stop it, because you like to think you can even if you won’t, when you reach out by the campfire, press a thumb against the hummingbird wing of his pulse, just to check, because you _pushpushpush_ until your things break and he’s the only one who never has.

 

 

17\. This is your legend and you are its king. You have taken taken taken for centuries, watched the seas change, mountains rise, waiting for this boy you madlymadly love, like he’s a disease in your veins, a knife to the jugular, and if he’s the only person in the world who hits you like he means it, bites you like he hates you, and kisses you like he’s dying, then you’ve won because you’re going to die with him, going to live with him because Neverland looks after its own and the only thing henry is aside from his own is _yours_. And when he matches you, toe to toe with teeth and fire, take him, take him, take him, know that he’ll never stop pushing you then following you over the precipice, hold his hand, tight. Kiss him like a warzone, never hold back, draw blood.

Remember; you love with your teeth.

 

 


End file.
